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Russian-China relations have never been better. It's a matter of realism in any case: Russia doesn't have the population or the political will to exploit its vast resources, let alone project power in Central Asia. Russia is not a rising power, but an alliance with China would prevent its decline. Its main adversaries are the EU/US.

Well, the Mainland Chinese, yes this is what we overseas-born Chinese called them, gave a chunk of land to the Russians. That piece of land has petrol. As a result, the Russians has made money from that. Yes, Russians do like to befriends with the Chinese. Not just the Mainland Chinese. I get a lot of approaches from them.

they are going to use technology that is considered non-ethical in the west, and I don't see how we can prevent them from doing so

it is important to be more critical about what is ethical and what not
we must be sure our judgment is not clouded by lobbyists of all kinds or by political correctness
or we will be no match for China and the like

This is indeed unethical. It is almost like in past when the Mainland Chinese invented gun powder but due to confucianism it was not used to rule the world. Then, the west used it to rule to world. The west had found formulas how to modify genetics prior to the Mainland Chinese scientist ability to do this, however, due to ethnical reasons, they did not go forward with this. It is as if though, communism destroyed Chinese traditional cultures and now it is just about power and money, but instead of ruled by the emperors, it is now replaced by communist rulers.

Of course it is understandable the former Warschau Pact nations wanted to join NATO, but NATO should not have accepted them, especially in the case of the Baltic states; that has been a Peace of Weimar-like mistake.

This your thought - I would be very thankful if you could elaborate it more clearly - hope I did not understand you well.

Well, the Mainland Chinese, yes this is what we overseas-born Chinese called them, gave a chunk of land to the Russians. That piece of land has petrol. As a result, the Russians has made money from that. Yes, Russians do like to befriends with the Chinese. Not just the Mainland Chinese. I get a lot of approaches from them.

Yes, it is only the matter of realism, not the geopolitical reality and definitely not of long time trend. If you are on the side of selfishness and braking the rule of international law wherever possible, you easily find like minded partner. This is the reality of Russian - Chinese alliance.
beyond this topic and for a curiosity only - do you know the name of famous chinese personality son, who entered Prague with Wehrmacht in 1939?

"Li Chengzhi had a lot to learn when he first got a job as a professional censor.Like many young people in China, the 24-year-old recent college graduate knew little about the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. He had never heard of China’s most famous dissident, Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died in custody two years ago.Now, after training, he knows what to look for — and what to block. He spends his hours scanning online content on behalf of Chinese media companies looking for anything that will provoke the government’s wrath. He knows how to spot code words that obliquely refer to Chinese leaders and scandals, or the memes that touch on subjects the Chinese government doesn’t want people to read about.Mr. Li, who still has traces of youthful acne on his face, takes his job seriously. “It helps cleanse the online environment,” he said.For Chinese companies, staying on the safe side of government censors is a matter of life and death. Adding to the burden, the authorities demand that companies censor themselves, spurring them to hire thousands of people to police content."

Twitter and Facebook should send people over to get better training. :)

for starters, the people’s liberation army has been openly threatening to intervene to shut down the protests against lam’s government. and in cases where pro-government “triad” thugs, most likely based on the mainland, have shown up to assail protesters, the police have been conveniently absent. as everyone in hong kong knows, these extrajudicial beatings had to have been sanctioned by xi’s government. more ominously, xi may have already decided that the time for “one country, two systems” has passed. china, he might argue, can no longer tolerate a functioning quasi-democracy within its territory, despite the agreement it accepted as a condition of hong kong’s return to chinese sovereignty in 1997.

Most of people in the world and even in mainland china don’t know how CCP tortures people and who they were;

At the height of the frenzy of China’s Cultural Revolution, victims were eaten at macabre “flesh banquets”, but 50 years after the turmoil began, the Communist Party is suppressing remembrance and historical reckoning of the era and its excesses.
Launched by Mao in 1966 to topple his political enemies after the failure of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution saw a decade of violence and destruction nationwide as party-led class conflict devolved into social chaos.
Teenaged Red Guards beat teachers to death for being “counter-revolutionaries” and family members denounced one another while factions clashed bitterly for control across the country.
-----
Scholars say the violence resulted from Wuxuan’s remote location, the ruthless regional Communist leader, poverty and bitter factionalism.
“In 10 years of catastrophe, Guangxi not only saw numerous deaths, they were also of appalling cruelty and viciousness,” the retired cadre wrote in an unpublished manuscript seen by AFP.
“There were beheadings, beatings, live burials, stonings, drownings, boilings, group slaughters, disembowellings, digging out hearts, livers, genitals, slicing off flesh, blowing up with dynamite, and more, with no method unused.”

at some high schools, students killed their principals in the school courtyard and then cooked and ate the bodies to celebrate a triumph over "counterrevolutionaries," the documents report. government-run cafeterias are said to have displayed bodies dangling on meat hooks and to have served human flesh to employees. "there are many varieties of cannibalism," declares one report, "and among them are these: killing someone and making a late dinner of it, slicing off the meat and having a big party, dividing up the flesh so each person takes a large chunk home to boil, roasting the liver and eating it for its medicinal properties, and so on."

History repeated again:

abstract records on human sacrifice have been revealed by the oracle-bone inscriptions of shang dynasty. human sacrifices carry special symbolic significance in shang dynasty for worshipping spirits. different methods of killing were used in worship rituals. as the inscription reveals, some words are used as the methods of killing of human beings in general. in the meantime, some special characters are used to refer to specific killing methods through analysis of the characters and structures of the language. the lecture will focus on

12 different methods of killing human sacrifice. the methods include beheading, splitting the body into halves, dismembering bodies, beating to death, chopping to death, extracting blood, burying alive, drowning, burning to death, boiling, corpse displaying, exposing body part to hot sun. with the analysis of the different methods of human sacrifice, it is easy to conclude that human sacrifice was a very common religious practice in shang dynasty. these practices reflect the cruelty of the rulers to their subjects and their piety towards the spirits they worship.

The Communist Party of China would like the mainland Chinese population and the rest of the world to believe that the ongoing, sometimes violent protests in Hong Kong pose a threat of "terrorism." But the truth is that China has only itself to blame for pushing the city's idealistic youth into the streets once again.

Under the serious condition,

Trump is actively trying to break any country that refuses to bow to his demands. The American people are not so arrogant and intemperate, but some of Trump’s advisers surely are. National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, for example, both epitomize a uniquely arrogant approach to the world, amplified by religious fundamentalism in the case of Pompeo.

Bolton visited London recently to encourage the United Kingdom’s new prime minister, Boris Johnson, in his determination to leave the European Union with or without a Brexit deal. Trump and Bolton don’t give a whit about the UK, but they ardently hope the EU fails. Any enemy of the Union – such as Johnson, Italy’s Matteo Salvini, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán – is therefore a friend of Trump, Bolton, and Pompeo.

I just read that in Sweden they have started inserting a microchip in the hand to pay for things, open doors etc.

This isn't the first time I have thought they're quite mad!

Have they no concept that such a chip could be used by the government to keep track of everything they do?

It's beyond me. Was skepticism as well as aggression bred out of them because all their warrior types went abroad? Or is it because these tiny groups on the periphery of Europe were mostly left alone and not very often subject to attempts at control by any government, not even their own?

Yet, even countries like Italy and Germany, certainly no strangers to governments which tried to control them, are remarkably accepting of government control over virtually every aspect of their lives.

Why is it only in the Anglo countries that there is at least in some a healthy distrust of too strong governments and the invasion of privacy?

Both "1984" and "Brave New World" should be brought back to the schools. They should throw in a lot of Jefferson too: "The best government is the least government".

Fahrenheit 451 was taught in my class in Jr. High. Got accustomed to 1984 with Libertarian (gold) forums. Jefferson is one of my favorites.

The only bad thing China is doing is exporting facial recognition software to the US. That is scary, like 'enemy of the state' scary. Whoever is in charge can easily bump off enemies.

I'm supportive of Tibet, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, but it's not my place to say. Tibet prefers Indian culture, whilst Hong Kong and Macau would rather be Singapore. Only Taiwan isn't actually Tibeto-Burman, at least not out of choice, but due to functioning as the rump state of the Republic of China, despite the fact that they're the Austronesian Urheimat. Why shouldn't Taipei get back on track by assembling an insular confederacy that is inclusive of Madagascar, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, with interests in New Zealand, Hawaii and Easter Island? If there is a Chinese Civil War II, I would not be surprised.

Why shouldn't Taipei get back on track by assembling an insular confederacy that is inclusive of Madagascar, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, with interests in New Zealand, Hawaii and Easter Island?

Maybe because Taipei (and Taiwan) is dominated by non-Austronesian speaking people of Han Chinese origin who probably aren't interested in assembling a pan-Austronesian insular confederacy. Even if Taipei tried to do so, I doubt whether other Austronesian speaking countries would respond.

The Han Chinese tend to stereotype the Austronesian speaking indigenous minorities in Taiwan as musically talented and easy going, but lazy, much like the stereotyping of Polynesian minorities in places like New Zealand, Australia and Hawaii. So there's a problem of lack of respect.